Wonder why it was larger than it needed to be to begin with.

Ahhh well...I am getting a feel for the constant quality settings. They're quite sensitive to adjustments but I believe I am getting close to a value that will work.

Chewtobacca said:

jdryyz said: How is it that I can get away with compressing the 16GB file down to 8GB and not notice any reduction in quality?

Higher file-size does not necessarily mean higher quality. The MKV was much bigger than it needed to be, so your recompressed file ended up being considerably smaller.